In Praise of the Idiot: On Holy Fools

I’ve always been drawn to the figure of the holy fool, that shambling, stammering creature who wanders through literature and folklore with a vacant grin and, somehow, a kind of cosmic authority. Russian literature makes an art of him: Prince Myshkin in The Idiot wandering through the wreckage of aristocratic society, his innocence mistaken for stupidity, his guilelessness for mental defect. The holy fool disrupts, but not with power or wit. He stumbles into truths that kings and scholars miss entirely. He holds the mirror, crooked and cracked as it may be, to the world’s self-importance.

This figure exists almost everywhere, lurking in Shakespearean fools who alone speak the truth in riddles, in Zen tricksters like Ikkyū, who break every monastic rule while embodying enlightenment itself, and in Native American Coyote tales, where wisdom emerges from pratfalls and reversals. Even Don Quixote, tilting at windmills, is both absurd and somehow noble, his delusions carrying a purity missing from the “sane” world. The Russians had a name for this archetype: the yurodivy, the “fool for Christ.” These holy fools roamed medieval Moscow half-naked in the snow, rebuking tsars, cursing merchants, eating from the same bowls as beggars and dogs. One, St. Basil, became so famous that they named Moscow’s most glorious cathedral after him. The bright, whirling towers of St. Basil’s stand as a monument to the man who scolded Ivan the Terrible for his cruelty and refused to be killed for it. Fools, apparently, are hard to silence.

Even in the Bible, holy foolishness keeps breaking through. King David danced with “all his might” before the Ark of the Covenant, whirling in a frenzy of joy so undignified that his wife Michal despised him for it. David, unbothered, told her he would become “even more undignified than this” if that’s what worship required. It’s a striking image: the king of Israel, sweat-soaked and ecstatic, humiliating himself in front of his court because some truths can’t be carried with composure.

Then there’s the prophet Isaiah, wandering Jerusalem naked for three years as a living sermon. Ezekiel lay on his side for 390 days to dramatize Israel’s sin. Hosea married a prostitute as a parable of divine love. Again and again, the prophets shattered decorum to reveal some sliver of God’s perspective, as though only absurdity could crack the armor of power and piety.

Centuries later, the Apostle Paul would write to the Corinthians, “We are fools for Christ’s sake,” embracing the insult hurled by Roman intellectuals at this strange new faith with its crucified Messiah. Christianity itself, in its earliest days, looked like a kind of madness: a religion built around weakness instead of strength, forgiveness instead of revenge, a king who rode a donkey and died a slave’s death.

The Russians canonized the character of the fool. Dostoevsky gave us more than Prince Myshkin. There is Sonya in Crime and Punishment, the meek, pious prostitute who reads the story of Lazarus to Raskolnikov and becomes the novel’s spiritual center. There is Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov, so gentle and guileless that cynical readers sometimes dismiss him as naïve, until they realize the book itself bends toward his quiet, radiant faith. Russian history teems with holy fools, and they carried immunity, somehow. Tyrants tolerated what they could not interpret. And I suppose that’s the key: the fool resists interpretation. He doesn’t fit the story the powerful and wealthy tell about themselves. He interrupts it.

There’s a paradox here: the idiot sees clearly because he is blind to ambition, status, or self-preservation. He lacks the armor we wear to move through society. He blurts, laughs, loves, and weeps at the most inopportune times, an unedited human being. And because he is unedited and unfiltered, the fool is free.

Take a look at Ted Lasso, one of our recent television good guys. On paper, Ted should be a ridiculous character. He's a mustachioed American football coach hired to manage an English soccer club he knows absolutely nothing about, spouting corny aphorisms and dad jokes like an annoying windup toy. In early episodes, he is a punchline waiting to happen. And yet, as the series unfolds, Ted becomes something closer to the Dostoevskian fool than to the sitcom buffoon. His relentless optimism, his belief in people despite every betrayal and setback, slices through irony and cynicism the way Prince Myshkin’s innocence unsettled the jaded St. Petersburg elite.

Like the holy fools before him, Ted Lasso reveals everyone else, not through grand speeches, but through unshakable decency. He exposes cruelty, vanity, and loneliness simply by refusing to play along. The modern world, like every world before it, finds such earnestness suspicious. Surely there must be some angle, some hustle? But no. The holy fool has no angle. That’s the point.

I suspect my own attraction to these characters comes from the way they stand at the crossroads of comedy and revelation. The fool is funny, yes, but his laughter rings in the dark. He accepts the absurdity of life without flinching, maybe even without noticing, and in doing so reaches something philosophers struggle to name. Camus gave us Sisyphus smiling at the absurd; Dostoevsky gave us Myshkin staring into the moral void with compassion; Ted Lasso gives us a man who bakes biscuits for his enemies and refuses to stop believing in kindness.

Maybe, deep down, I want to believe what the holy fool suggests: that wisdom isn’t always found in solemnity, that salvation sometimes wears the face of an idiot grinning at the world’s self-importance, and that the punchline, in the end, might be grace itself. Radical grace.